Telstra T-Hub, Reinventing the Wheel, I Mean Phone

What do we have here? Australian Telstra has come up with a new way to keep their customers at bay. Over the last decade the use of landline phones has dropped drastically, people are using cell phones and computer to communicate with each other, normal phones are almost dead. So I must say that this is truly a worthy effort to reinvent the wheel, I mean phone, but will it prove successful? Let’s take a look.

As you may see from the picture it resembles an iPad, some even thought that this is some sort of a notepad that rivals iPad when it was first announced and photos released to the public, but that lasted very short. So what is T-Hub, I would say that it’s a mix of a landline phone and a cell phone with some features of a tablet PC. T-Hub has a normal wireless phone unit and a 7 inch LCD touch screen. The LCD touch screen looks promising, but when you take it for a ride you will see that it has limited options, but those options may prove useful and sufficient for some.

Using the T-Hub LCD touch screen the first thing you will notice is the easy to use menu that offers several options. With just one touch of your finger you can connect to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. The idea is to bring popularity to a landline phone by adding what cell phones are used for lately, internet and social websites. The only difference is that you get a broadband wireless internet with this little thing, so you have high speeds available, which is useful for watching YouTube videos which are also available on T-Hub. But aside from the famous three, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube there isn’t much more. Unfortunately you can’t type an internet address and visit the site you want.

What you can do is check the recent news, weather forecast or listen to internet radio. So you will have a phone that plays videos and music all day long, personally I don’t see much point to that, but someone will sure like it. The option I do like though is SMS availability; you can send text messages to both cell phones and landline phones in Telstra’s network. Other useful features that T-Hub offers are calendar, digital or analog clock, it just looks like analog obviously, but you can use it like a radio clock. Now when I first heard that on a presentation I thought to myself, OK they are trying to get you to spend over $2000 in the course of two years and they are offering a radio clock, what the hell? Well, I still have that opinion, but that is just me.

In the end you have yellow pages, white pages and you can even set a slideshow of your favorite picture, T-Hub does have a memory card slot. But again, like radio clock, having a digital photo frame is not what I had in mind when I saw this 7 inch LCD touch screen. Well if this got your attention I would suggest keeping an eye out on price compare in the future. Although this version doesn’t have much, I am guessing that there will soon be a new version which might bring some neat improvements that we might actually use for something.